Be relentless in your pursuit of smart people

Do you remember meeting with your high school guidance counselor? Unigo founder Jordan Goldman does, but the meeting didn’t exactly go as planned. “I went to a public high school in Staten Island with 5,000 other kids. I was able to meet with my guidance counselor for about 15 minutes, and it wasn’t really able to help me with anything,“ Goldman said in interview.

Goldman wasn’t content to make a decision about his post-secondary future without consulting some experts, and turned to existing students to hear their thoughts. “I was trying to figure out what it was like at a bunch of different schools, so I started emailing people to see what the schools were really like. They started sending back these really long messages that were very informative. When I was in college, I kept emailing more and more students, so they gave me the idea to create a completely student-written set of guidebooks.”

After publishing The Students’ Guide to Colleges with Penguin Publishing for five years, Goldman decided to put these recommendations and reviews online, and founded Unigo in 2008. The site grew quickly, and Goldman is proud of the milestones that they have reached in the last four years. “Our biggest milestone was getting our first 100,000 reviews, and reaching over a million users. We have since expanded our services to include over a thousand counselors you can video chat with.”

The video chat functionality marks a shift in Unigo’s platform, changing the focus from helping students read reviews on colleges, to helping them craft their admission packages, and make decisions that are right for them. “When you’re doing your taxes, you get a professional to help. The process for applying to college is every bit as important, but there’s no equivalent.” Unigo launched Absolute Admit earlier this year, to help students get real-time help with the application process. “We work with former advisors from Harvard, and Columbia, and have basically built an online course that walks you through every single step of the admissions process. You have interactive video lessons on how to improve every aspect of your application, and live one-on-one counseling help. It helps students at home get through this process. “

Unigo secured funding in 2011 from publisher McGraw-Hill Education, and has built an impressive board of directors including McGraw-Hill VP Bill Oldsey. Goldman believes tenacity is the key to recruiting high-profile members to a startup board. “A lot of it is just saying ‘Who’s out there?’ and then just continually contacting them. Don’t be discouraged by the lack of response. I’m glad I wasn’t put off by it – I emailed a lot of these people nine or 10 times, and when I finally did meet up with them, rather than say they were put off, it made them feel like I was serious, that I knew what I was doing. I wasn’t going to waste their time.”

For aspiring entrepreneurs, Goldman advises flexibility, as the startup world rarely works as planned. “You’re going to create a business plan, and you’re going to decide how things are going to go, but at the end of the day you’re going to find nothing actually goes that way. Your biggest users will come from unexpected sources, and you can plan something for months only to have it derailed.” He also advocates being relentless in your pursuit of smart people, adding, “You have to be persistent to work with, and talk to, the smartest people. But you have to have the flexibility to learn as fast as you can and be nimble, knowing that things will go in directions you never anticipated.”

When asked about what the future holds for him, and for Unigo, Goldman believes they are one in the same. “We’re growing very quickly with this new course, and we’re really excited about that. I think there are millions of students that are applying to college every year, and the institutions that are set up to guide them are broken. How can we guide people? It’s a big issue, and we want to be the company that helps everyone through this process.”

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